The extract is taken from the essay The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf. It seemingly displays the ideas about “novel” worked out by the writer comparing traditional and modern fiction, but the intelligent reader, looking through the two parts composing the text, can also understand her whole vision of life.
The first introductory part begins with the statement that traditional novels are not able to give the reader what he’s searching. Even Mrs. Woolf calls it “hypothesis”, it can be considered the thesis of the extract or, at least, the starting point of the argumentation. It continues pointing out the limits of this kind of literary form: fiction doesn’t give the reader the right idea of life, even it tries to be more likely as possible. Traditional rules and the aim of likelihood are considered as “brakes” for the modern writer activity. The essayist uses figurative language like the metaphors of tight-fitting stuff and of the tyrant to convey the idea of constraint and limit. The notion emerging is that a writer doesn’t have to describe reality following outdated rules because he will never return the correct impression of it.        
The second sequence has the function of inspiring a reflection about the features of life in the mind of the reader. He is directly involved in the meditation through the imperative tense “Look”. Mrs. Woolf marks out her opinion about the complexity of existence by means of a scientific demonstration: the different impressions of the mind come to us as atoms and “and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday”. Then this complexity and vagueness are the principal obstacle to likelihood, so giving back those features, loosening from describing external events, should be writer’s principal job.